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Friday, 7 November 2014

The Girl Who Came Back to Life by Craig Staufenberg @YouMakeArtDumb #Excerpt #MGLit #AmReading

THE YOUNG ORPHAN

Sophie was twelve years old when
her parents died. Three days later, she sat on a hill overlooking her
town’s cemetery and watched the gravediggers chip away at the hard
winter ground for the better part of the day.

Sophie
watched as the sun began to set and two holes appeared in the ground,
large enough to fit her parents’ bodies. When she saw the small
procession of mourners carry two cheap wooden caskets out of the funeral
hall and down the crooked path to the cemetery, she stood up on that
hill and walked the other way.

Though they had taught
Sophie about the pilgrimage north to the City of the Dead, and though
they told their daughter she would have to Send them one day, her
parents had died suddenly and never fully prepared her for the realities
of life, death, and the journey that lay ahead of her.

In
her innocence, she didn’t understand the full weight of her parents’
death. It was just another problem to solve, and as she walked away from
the cemetery, back into town and towards her grandmother’s house, she
settled on the single obvious solution to her parents’ passing. She
would take the pilgrimage north, yet, while the other mourners would
travel to say “Goodbye” to their loved ones, Sophie would implement a
different plan. She would find her parents’ spirits in the City of the
Dead, remind them where they belonged, and return them back home to be
with her once more.

Sophie had never heard of the dead
coming back from the north, but that didn’t stop her from dreaming of
returning to life what death had claimed from her.

When
you die, your spirit wakes in the north, in the City of the Dead.
There, you wander the cold until one of your living loved ones finds
you, says “Goodbye,” and Sends you to the next world. After her parents die, 12-year-old
Sophie refuses to release their spirits. Instead, she resolves to travel
to the City of the Dead to bring her mother and father’s spirits back
home with her. Taking the long pilgrimage north
with her gruff & distant grandmother—by train, by foot, by boat;
over ruined mountains and plains and oceans—Sophie struggles to return
what death stole from her. Yet the journey offers her many hard,
unexpected lessons—what to hold on to, when to let go, and who she must
truly bring back to life.